WordPress.org

Still sprucing up the WordPress website, a little fall cleaning if you will.

The forum has been improved a little more to handle some obscure character problems. I also fixed the minor bug in the last discussions list that showed the wrong number of replies. I haven’t looked at the RSS code lately, and to be truthful I don’t know if anyone even uses it, but if you do and you notice any problems let me now and I’ll take a look at it.

The site is now XHTML 1.1 and is being sent with the MIME type of application/xhtml+xml to browsers that support it. This means we’ll have to be even more vigilant than ever against errors, but I think that’s a good thing. I’ve validated the entire site except the forums and it is all kosher. I’m working on the forums there, but there are a lot of little things that need to be fixed before it becomes XHTML 1.1.

WordPress itself, incidentally, is XHTML 1.1 compliant out of the box, all you have to do is switch the DOCTYPE and you’re ready to roll. For compability reasons the default DOCTYPE is XHTML 1 Transitional, which is going to be the best choice for the vast majority of people out there. We’re realists.

Update: Wow, I forgot width and bgcolor aren’t around anymore in 1.1, this might take longer than I thought.

I fixed the forums so that now instead of the threads being unsemantic tables they are ordered lists, styled a little different than they were before. This should mean faster load times for everyone. The thread lists and such I’m inclined to leave because it really is representing tabular information, just the thread itself wasn’t.

I also fixed up the character handling for the forum. It now allows a few tags (listed by the post box) and encodes everything else. This should make posting code and such much easier. Enjoy!

There is also a new function called get_links_list() but I’ll let Dougal explain that.

Oh, sure, put me on the spot. 🙂


/*
* function get_links_list()
*
* added by Dougal
*
* Output a list of all links, listed by category, using the
* settings in $tablelinkcategories and output it as a nested
* HTML unordered list.
*
* Parameters:
* order (default 'name') - Sort link categories by 'name' or 'id'
* hide_if_empty (default true) - Supress listing empty link categories
*/


You can see it in action on my in-testing version of my blog. All the links listed in the menu between the “Links:” heading down to the calendar were generated by a single line in my template that looks like this:


<?php
get_links_list('id');
?>


I’m telling it to sort my link categories by id, rather than by name, because I entered my categories into the sytem in a particular order that I wanted to use. The links under each category are sorted according to the options set in the Link Manager’s “Manage Link Categories” section.

This function is hardcoded to generate an HTML unordered list (<ul /> ) Maybe one day we’ll make a similar function that can generate the links with some different HTML formatting. But don’t count on it.

So what’s been going on since we released the beta?

Dougal just committed conditional GET support for all the RSS files.

I’ve been squashing bugs wherever possible, particularly with regards to the intelligent line break tool. It now has a fairly sophisticated understanding of different types of block level tags, nested lists, arbitrary whitespace, and tables. So if it didn’t work for you before, give autop a try again.

I am addicted to this cursor aware quicktags code. It’s got to be one of the most useful improvements in .72. Kudos to Alex.

Mike is back in full force in the forums and has committed some fixes to links code.

There is also a new function called get_links_list() but I’ll let Dougal explain that.

Please try it out and give us some feedback in the forums. Enjoy!

Abbreviated upgrade instructions for the impatient:

Upgrading from 0.71

1. Overwrite your old .71 files, backing up most likely your index.php and any other files you customized.
2. Open up wp-config.sample.php and edit the database information. Then rename that file wp-config.php.
3. Do a happy dance because that’s probably the last time you’ll ever have to manually edit a configuration file.,
4. Run wp-admin/upgrade-071-to-072.php
5. Login and double check all of the options transferred successfully. That should be it!

I just checked in the password protected posts code and some improved autop. This will be in the next release. Check it out.

There was a good bit of progress today, as Michel, Dougal, and I hammered out some bugs on IRC (#wordpress on freenode. Dougal caught a bug in the upgrade script, I tweaked some links code to make it more consistent with the date handling elseware in the application, and I worked on the style a bit. There was a table used in part of the administration interface that is now gone, replace by floating divs. (So you can blog underwater.) This has the added bonus of being extra friendly to lower resolutions and non-CSS capable user agents. Tweaking to the admin CSS will continue, but I’d really love to see some submissions from the community as well.

Most exciting, Alex checked in his cursor-aware quicktag code today. It’s sweet! Imagine being able to double-click a word anywhere, press alt+b and have it surrounded by <strong> tags. I spent quite a bit of time with his code, optimizing the buttons, the markup and CSS, adding access keys, and generally polishing. This is a great new feature and Alex deserves some applause for it. Did I mention it was cross-browser?

Anyway, all of this was with the intention of getting a beta out today. However, I’d like to stamp out this one last bug in convert_char before the first beta. I know it’s been too long since the last release and we’re working to rectify the situation as soon as possible. Comments welcome. 🙂

Dougal has done some great work already adding full MetaWeblog API and partial MT API support already, and Orien Vandenbergh spotted a capitalization bug that is now fixed. Moving along nicely.

Mike checked in some bug fixes, but he’s now on vacation and banned from the CVS for the duration. 🙂

Michel (yes that one) and I tracked down a nasty bug that would create invalid characters from normal quotes.

Alex has said he’s going to work on improving the quicktag code to be cursor aware as well as incorporate a few other improvements in the next couple of days.

I checked in the hooks to the post section of the documentation. Eventually everything in WordPress will have these hooks, meaning for anything you don’t understand help is just a click away. Thanks to Joe Clark for answering some accesibility questions regarding this addition and making some suggestions.

So, in the spirit of the last post, I’d like to post about the two commits I’ve made so far today.

The first was to the comments posting code, decreasing the flood protection timeout to something more in line with someone actually going from entry to entry and commenting. Anything over five seconds is generally enough to discourage casual flooding, and anything much more serious should probably not be dealt with at the application level but would be beter addressed by the web server or OS.

While importing a friend’s blog from Blogger Pro to WordPress I noticed that none of the titles imported. A closer look revealed that titles are not addressed by the blogger-2-wp.php import script, so I went ahead and added title support and updated the import script accordingly. The import went great, so people coming over from Blogger can now keep their titles. This is in the CVS now and will be included with the next release.